War Room

by Michael Holley

  But Brady had been told the opposite on the sideline by Belichick and Weis. They trusted him, and they didn’t trust leaving their fate to a coin flip and, perhaps, an escape from the box by Faulk. Who could chance it? And why would they, since they hadn’t thought and played that way all season? Despite the effective game plan, the Rams still had gained significantly more yards. The Rams had an edge in time of possession. The Rams had momentum. Yet the Patriots, with no turnovers, had the ball and an opportunity to go for the win.

  Robert Kraft; his wife, Myra; and his son Jonathan were paying no attention to John Madden. They weren’t listening to an NFL official, either, who had come to their private box with six minutes to play and offered to escort them to the field. No chance. The official came back a few minutes later. Still, not interested. They’d watch the entire game and then worry about getting to the field later.

  What they were able to see was confidence and precision from Brady. The one time he could have been flustered, on a Rams blitz, he stepped to his right and threw the ball out of bounds. On the next play, from the Patriots’ forty-one, Brady and Weis displayed just how much they believed in what they were doing. They called a play, RT 64 MAX ALL IN XQ, that had gone for an incompletion earlier. So they called it again.

  “When I saw how they lined up, I knew they weren’t going to be in a man defense,” Brown says. “I said, ‘There’s going to be a hole somewhere, I just have to find it.’ Once I caught the ball and got close to the sideline, I knew I could have made a better move to make the defender miss. But I wanted to be sure we had enough time to run one more play and spike, so I ran out of bounds. But I know I could have had more.”

  What he gave them was good enough, a twenty-three-yard play that moved the ball to the Rams’ thirty-six. Twenty-one seconds remained. The Patriots needed just a few more yards to be in comfortable field-goal range.

  In a season of unintentional poetry, it was fitting that the next play would practically be a catch by all who had been with the Patriots since their local TV blackouts, one-and two-win seasons, and franchise coffers that had more singles than hundred-dollar bills. Jermaine Wiggins, a tight end from East Boston, was the only Patriots player who had been born and raised in the area. He understood what it would mean for the Patriots to win something. This was a team that almost moved to Saint Louis after the 1993 season. Of the Red Sox, Bruins, and Celtics, it was the only local franchise that couldn’t claim a single championship. So it was perfect that the Boston kid, Wiggy, would represent the city and catch Brady’s final pass of the day for six yards.

  “What Tom Brady just did gives me goose bumps,” the converted Madden told his TV audience as the Patriots prepared for the win.

  With seven seconds left, Vinatieri took the field. No one had been steadier in the postseason. He had gotten the team here by kicking his way through snowflakes, and in the temperature-controlled dome, he knew that confetti would be the only thing that might be falling from above. As he walked to the field, white lights flashed around him. He heard chatter from his own team and the Rams, too, but he blocked them all out. This is what he had mapped out the night before as he sat in his hotel room, halfway paging through a few magazines, and what he thought of the next morning as he determinedly took the first team bus to the stadium. He was as confident in his abilities as Brady was in his, so there was nothing anyone could say or do in this moment to bother him.

  The ball was snapped and Vinatieri stepped into it and kicked as if there was a chance someone would move the goalposts back ten yards. It was a wallop. It exploded off his right black shoe, purposefully one size smaller than normal so there wouldn’t be slippage, and it required neither prayers nor body English. It was something everyone could understand: right down the middle and good from forty-eight yards. The Patriots were Super Bowl champions.

  Belichick had won his first Super Bowl as a head coach, and he had done it standing near his father, Steve, the man who taught him the game. The eldest of his three children, daughter Amanda, was the first person to reach him and wrap him in a hug. Safety Lawyer Milloy was next. There were hugs in the owner’s box, where the Krafts still were, before they were taken to the field in a rickety freight elevator. In the coaches’ box, Scott Pioli had been so excited that he tumbled down the stairs and into a massive embrace with screaming colleagues. Brady found Drew Bledsoe and excitedly slapped his shoulder pads. Some players dropped to their knees and cried.

  In the vision of Belichick and Pioli, this was just part of what they had in mind when they thought of the New England Patriots. This was the part of the story where they win the championship, but it’s not where the story ends. The plan all along was to win and be in position to repeat the process, year after year. Some would call it the pursuit of the impossible in a salary-cap league, a league that is designed to make things even. But Belichick was passionate about who the Patriots were and who they could become.

  As he sat in a nearly empty coaches’ locker room, well after the game had ended, he was asked to describe what he had just seen. He shook his head in disbelief.

  “This was miraculous,” he said.

  He then went on to say, with all respect, that the team that had just won the Super Bowl had a lot of work to do to reach the ideal of consistent championship contender. It meant that the team in the front office, coaches and scouts, were going to have to get back to work soon. And the team on the field shouldn’t get too comfortable. He was asked how many players on the Super Bowl champs would have to be replaced before he could call them perennial championship threats. He didn’t hesitate:

  “About twenty.”

  3

  The Culture of Winners

  The conference room, filled with coaches, was mostly dark. There was a giant screen on the wall farthest away from the door, and all eyes were on that screen. The coaches met like this daily, shuttling into the room to analyze what they had just seen in practice. They came armed with pens and notepads, bottled water, coffee, packs of gum or mints, and, in some cases, spitting cups for their tobacco.

  There was always something to be found on the big screen that they hadn’t seen live in practice. But on this fall afternoon in 2002, it didn’t take the Patriots’ coaching audience long to realize that this was not going to be a good day at the movies. Bill Belichick was in control of the clicker, and he continued to do the same thing for what seemed like twenty-five minutes: He would let the practice images roll for a few seconds, stop, rewind, and shake his head.

  “Not good,” he would say after one sequence.

  “This is bad,” he’d say after another.

  “This is terrible … what kind of technique is that? Are any of us teaching him to play like that?” he’d add to yet another replay.

  On this October day, all of his commentary was reserved for one of the new guys, defensive tackle Steve Martin, who was signed to help stop the run. No one was happy with Martin’s play, but he at least was a reminder of how blessed the Patriots had been in 2001. It had been one of those years that few people, in any profession, experience. It was a year when all negatives became positive. The starting quarterback got hurt and his backup turned out to be better. A game was won in Buffalo when it was determined that an unconscious receiver, sprawled near the sideline, had possession of the ball. A fumble that would have ended the season was ruled an incompletion, which opened the door for not one but two successful field goals in a blizzard. A two-touchdown underdog won the Super Bowl.

  Even every free agent the Patriots touched had been golden. They were the I-can’t-believe-it stars of a bargain-shopping commercial. They had found: a discarded running back in Antowain Smith who gave them 1,100 rushing yards and 12 touchdowns; a special-teams captain, Larry Izzo; a wide receiver in David Patten, unwanted by the 3–13 Browns, who became a starter and deep threat; a young, starting outside linebacker, Mike Vrabel, who was both good enough to play in their system and smart enough to teach it; and a versatile, starting guard in Mik
e Compton who could flip between playing center and guard within a series.

  The Patriots had been good for most of 2001, and when the games were most important they had been great. It carried them to one of the most unlikely championships in the history of pro sports. But the truth was that they had been lucky, too. The phrases usually don’t go together, but they were a defending Super Bowl champion that was in the middle of rebuilding. They knew that internally, although they forever lost the right to say it publicly as soon as the red, white, and blue confetti swirled among them on an unforgettable February night in the Superdome.

  They were agitated in 2002. They weren’t living up to their billing, and the shine from their luck was gone. At best, their signings could be described as marginal. The 320-pound Martin, a frequent target of the coaches, was supposed to add a dimension that the Super Bowl champs didn’t have the previous year. He’d be their true, two-gapping nose tackle. It meant that he would have the discipline and strength to stay square at the point of attack. He’d be able to control the gaps to his left and right, be tough, and allow his teammates to get the glory for his dirty work. But Martin wanted media glory more than anything else, and as Belichick pointed out to the coaches in the film room, his technique was inconsistent and substandard.

  It was an odd position for a champion to be in. There hadn’t been a rush by Belichick and Scott Pioli to retain the team they had. On the contrary, at their end-of-season self-scouting meetings with the coaches, they pointed to several positions where they needed to improve.

  They thought they could upgrade the safety spot, where Matt Stevens and Tebucky Jones had split time in ’01. Stevens had an off-the-charts score on the Wonderlic, the predraft test used to see how quickly a player could process information, but the coaches didn’t always feel he played smart. Jones was big and athletically gifted, but he had poor technique. So veteran safety Victor Green was signed away from the Jets, and despite his guile and want-to, the Patriots discovered Green’s speed had fallen off dramatically and the team suddenly had a player at the end of his career. They had gone most of the previous season without a reliable third receiver, so they drafted Louisville’s Deion Branch late in the second round and took a chance in the seventh round on Notre Dame’s David Givens. Those were hits. The big miss came in free agency, when they looked to Carolina and thought they had a found a young star, twenty-seven-year-old Donald Hayes, who was ready to break out. But the multiple route options in the Patriots’ offense tripped up Hayes, and he became a nonfactor after admitting in an interview that he didn’t know the plays.

  It was a return to most teams’ normal: one up, one down. They wanted to be better at tight end, even if East Boston’s own Jermaine Wiggins had caught ten balls in the play-off win against the Raiders and had made the last catch against the Rams to set up Adam Vinatieri’s Super Bowl—winning kick. (In fact, one of the coaches had derisively said that Wiggins was only able to create separation when the games were in the snow.) Wiggins left as a free agent and the Patriots moved up eleven spots in the first round for Colorado tight end Daniel Graham. He was a ferocious blocker, but he spent a lot of his rookie season watching as most of the catches went to free-agent signee Christian Fauria.

  The Patriots would go through the entire month of October without a victory, and by the time they got to November a few realities were tough to ignore. Sure, they were like many other champions who had to endure a sixteen-game season-after tour in which they got every opponent’s complete focus and best game. And they had to develop new chemistry, too, with Drew Bledsoe traded to Buffalo for a 2003 first-round pick and Tom Brady, in his first full season as a starter, expected to become one of the league’s top quarterbacks. More than that, though, were the words of Belichick after winning the Super Bowl. He had said they were twenty players away from consistent greatness, and he was right. The Patriots had a solid core, but they could point to a couple of areas where players were starting and the team didn’t think they should be. For example, the starting defensive ends from the Super Bowl season, Anthony Pleasant and Bobby Hamilton, were both smart players. Yet Pleasant was thirty-four and well past his prime, and Hamilton, despite his strong technique, was someone the coaches ultimately saw as a rotation guy. It was only a matter of time, maybe a draft or two, before both players would be replaced.

  Belichick and Pioli knew all of this logically, but their competitiveness led them to expect more than what was possible during the games. Belichick had become so frustrated with Martin that at times he put Hamilton, forty pounds lighter than Martin, at nose tackle just to illustrate what technique he was looking for. It didn’t matter. Martin’s performance was unchanged. Pioli would watch games in the coaches’ box, see a breakdown, and say to no one in particular, “Are you kidding me with that? Come on.” Brilliant coaching and scouting and player leadership wouldn’t be enough to fix some of the Patriots’ issues during the season. It was a good thing for them that they officially had people in-house who could diagnose and correct the problems.

  After trying for more than a year, Pioli, with a new vice president’s title and salary bump, had finally been able to sell Thomas Dimitroff on joining the scouting staff in New England. Dimitroff would continue to live in Boulder, Colorado, one of the most liberal and laid-back cities in the country, while being a national scout for the Patriots. From afar, it seemed like a personality-balancing exercise: There was the clearly defined, militaristic hierarchy of the Patriots paired with the live-and-let-live spirit of the small city in the Rockies.

  Dimitroff was planted in both worlds. He was an avid mountain biker and snowboarder who once thought of opening his own bike-outfitting shop if he didn’t have a career in football. He was passionate about the environment, animal rights, and nutrition, and had been either a vegan or vegetarian for a decade. He was a Presbyterian but was also intrigued by Taoism and had educated himself on its teachings by reading numerous books. Once, while living in Saskatchewan, his primary mode of transportation was a bicycle. His friends nicknamed it “Steel Wind” because he would ride it in any conditions. He would pedal through the prairies, the unplowed side roads packed with snow, in minus-15-degree temperatures (he didn’t own his first car until he was twenty-six). At the time, his living situation could have been the inspiration for a reality show on Canadian TV: He was a fledgling scout residing in the basement of a house, and his four housemates, all women, were members of the Canadian national volleyball team.

  He may have looked, talked, and dressed differently from most scouts he came across, but he was as in tune with what the Patriots expected as anyone in the NFL. He considered Pioli a brother, and six years after the passing of his father, he was grateful that Belichick had continued to stay in touch with his mother. Dimitroff also had studied enough of Belichick’s and Pioli’s hiring practices to sense a trend: “Bill and Scott have a knack for hiring people who are their own worst critics. Those two send a clear message: Do your job as well as you can, do your part, play your role. They rarely have to come down hard on their employees, because they pick their employees so well. You never would see anyone with a sense of entitlement there. They wouldn’t survive.”

  Dimitroff became one of those employees in 2002, and he could quickly sense what was at stake for the Patriots when he was in Foxboro for the December scouting meetings. The Patriots were 8–5 then, with a Monday-night game scheduled in Tennessee. The decent record hadn’t fooled many careful observers of the team. The Patriots were at or near the bottom of the league in run defense the entire season. There were too many missed tackles in the secondary and not enough speed, a couple of facts that automatically put Belichick on edge and would lead him to challenge anyone who had something positive to say about any of the team’s safeties.

  All the scouts had an idea of what the Patriots needed going forward, and those needs played out twice before national TV audiences in less than a week. The Monday-night game against the Titans was the worst of everything: The Ti
tans ran whenever they wanted, the Patriots couldn’t do anything offensively, and Brady suffered a separated right shoulder—although the team wouldn’t confirm that until the season was over. They were scheduled to play the Jets six days later in Foxboro, with an opportunity to take control of the AFC East. Belichick tried to emphasize how significant the week was by imploring the team to study and focus on what was important. The next day, he awoke to headlines that pointed out that the ever-quotable Martin had called Jets center Kevin Mawae a dirty player. Belichick had already seen enough from Martin, and now he was hearing and reading it, too. Martin either had misread the rising anger and frustration from the head coach or he didn’t care. He was cut, mostly because he didn’t do the job, but also as a message to the rest of the team.

  It didn’t translate to a win against New York. The Patriots lost, 30–17.

  After the loss to the Jets, Jeannette Belichick showed her mother’s intuition. The coach’s mom, an octogenarian, wasn’t even privy to the team’s true injury report. But she had been around long enough to know something was wrong with Brady. She stood near her husband, Steve, and whispered that Brady wasn’t okay. A few minutes later she saw the quarterback as he was leaving the stadium. He leaned over to make better eye contact with the petite woman, and she gently placed her right hand on his face, told him how concerned she was about him, and kissed him on the cheek. The Patriots were 8–7 and play-off outsiders, looking for help in the final week of the season.

  Pioli understood that no matter what happened at the end of the week, his department was going to need to do its best work for the 2003 season. There had been too many conversations, either in Belichick’s office after home games or on buses and planes on the road, for Pioli to misunderstand what the head coach was thinking. He didn’t always have to listen to Belichick to know what was on his mind. There was a brooding that the coach went through, well after the normal postgame venting period was over. Pioli had known him for years, so he could easily sense it, but it was so obvious in 2002 that all the coaches could, too. Many of the assistants would get to coaches’ meetings five and ten minutes ahead of Belichick and trade stories about what college football games they’d seen or something they’d heard Howard Stern say. But as soon as Belichick walked into a room, it was almost a scramble to prove that no one had been joking or had even thought of it. They laughed when he did. But he was rarely happy. He was so unhappy that in a few areas, he wasn’t just looking for a tweak, he wanted an overhaul.